Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Reviews

Our primary use case is the need for a VPN site to site connectivity across 30 or more sites. We employ the URL filtering, antivirus protection, malware, advanced threat protection, application control and identity fire walling. We're a customer of Barracuda and I'm a system administrator. 

I like the identity fire walling, malware protection and application control features. Those features provide us with the ability to give individuals or groups of users specific application access with the confidence that you have malware protection.

The solution could be improved with visibility into the traffic about what's happening at a given time. I think the analytics are weak and although it appears to be doing its job, it's difficult to know exactly what it's doing. 

I would like to see complete, real time and historical playback of all traffic and the amount of bandwidth utilized by each network.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

It's scalable but it's worthwhile scaling up physically before you need it. It means you basically have to overestimate the size of the appliance you're going to need. There isn't any trade up as you go kind of plan. If you think you're going to need more horsepower, you need to plan for that in advance so you're buying up more than you'll end up using. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I think the technical support is very good, I haven't had any problems with them. 

The initial setup was a little complicated and it required an implementation strategy. You need to plan your VPNs and fail-over capabilities, the method or the order in which you build in your additional network settings is very critical. If you don't do it in the right order, nothing works and you have to restart the box which nobody wants to do. 

The licensing cost varies according to the size of the box. The 600 series is about $USD 10,000 a year and the 80 is $400 a year. There's a big difference.

If you're going to need advanced visibility into new areas, then you should plan on purchasing a third party product to be able to capture everything and you will then need to build that cost in. If you don't do that, you're just not going to have that visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Our company installs and maintains solutions, mainly firewalls, for clients. We are resellers and I'm a consulting engineer. 

I like the use of the dashboard or the control panel to be able to manage multiple firewalls in either one entity or across multiples. The solution is fairly easy to configure.

I think the command line could be improved. In Cisco, Palo Alto and Juniper, the command line is a little more friendly. Everything I do is command line, I don't use a GUI interface. So you get used to using commands in the command line that have better command line tools.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The stability is great, I haven't had any issues. 

Scalability is good - there are many different models and you can pretty much go from small shop to giant ISP.

I've used the technical support and they do a great job. 

I'm using a variety of solutions so my comparison would be with Cisco which I've been using for 15 years. I like their control panel very much and prefer it to the Barracuda control panel when it comes to managing multiple devices. 

Implementation is usually straightforward. 

It's worth getting somebody who knows the solution to install it. Each of the firewall solutions has its own little quirks, but there's not a big difference between all of the upper level solutions - Barracuda, Juniper, Palo Alto, Cisco - they're all very similar and all do roughly the same thing. We generally recommend Barracuda to our clients. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution specifically for the security of our environments.

The is SIEM is very valuable for us. 

The dynamic VPN is great.

Their GPS possibilities and the security that it has, especially the SD-WAN functionality, is very good.

There is always room for improvement on the solution. 

Their client VPN is not always working that well, so on computers specifically that could be something to change.

It is pretty expensive, but I think all of the solutions are, so it's something that's expected.

There are some bugs that are in the program. Occasionally when there are updates, there's a bug or two that you might find that cause issues. There was a major issue for a while, and I don't know if it's fixed yet with a third-party VPN provider.

If you have another brand of VPN where you have to put an SSL VPN between two devices, Barracuda doesn't support that at a certain point. You can't actually build the VPN between Barracuda and a different device of a different brand.

I've been dealing with the solution for five years.

The stability of the solution isn't ideal. There are bugs and issues with updates occasionally.

The scalability of the solution is excellent. You can really scale and copy content and update and deploy centrally.

We've contacted technical support a lot. They used to have really, really good technical support. Lately, however, it's a bit less impressive than before. I've heard this from my technicians. It used to be a lot better.

The initial setup is straightforward, however, much like every firewall, there's a lot that can go wrong. You need some decent knowledge of the product. It is complex for somebody who is starting with it and has never used it before. However, it's fairly easy to manage via the control center. It's a pretty easy firewall to work with.

The solution costs more than 800 Euros to purchase an F18, which is an entry model, and then another 500 Euros for instant replacement, and 500 Euros for energized updates. The total package would be around 1,900 Euros for a five-year license and all updates for an entry model.

We are a Barracuda partner.

We have firewalls in all of our data centers and have a total of around 200 firewalls.

I would advise others that it's really a good product for SD-WAN, and for security. I would advise them to consider other products as well. Companies should certainly consider it for security features. For us, it's probably more of an SD-WAN product to really set up good connections between sites, but not a really in-depth security product per se. If a company needs more security, they should look at and compare different products that may really focus more on the security aspect. The solution has far fewer features than Sophos, for example, which is more security-driven.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten because it offers SD-WAN functionality and an easy zero-touch deployment. If you have a lot of sites and you need to connect them to each other, it's a really good product.

Barracuda X200 is the edge of our home system for VPN traffic. It provides IPsec to two other sites, including remote VPN access for users who are off the network.

• Inbound and outbound traffic analysis
• Rule creation wizard
• GUI portal
• Quality online support

The unit seems to be handling our 150MB pipe okay, but logger refresh leaves a bit to be desired.

A rule for email announcements, when configured hits occur, would be a great improvement for a more efficient experience.

We replaced an underperforming, continually locking Cisco RV130 unit. However, the two are not an "apples to apples" comparison.

My current company operates in the financial arena so we have to maintain our infrastructure according to leading security standards (PCI DSS and PA-DSS). These devices allow us to pass external and internal penetration tests by supporting all the recommendations of those standards.

At the moment, the most valuable features are Application Control (Layer 7 filtering) and IPS/IDS. For existing network architecture, we use Barracuda NG Firewall as a border firewall. We use it to control all in/out Internet traffic.

Sometimes we have a need for detailed reports. Barracuda NG Firewall does not have a reports module and uses a satellite application (Barracuda NG Firewall Report Creator). In some cases, this report is uncomfortable to use.

Yes, we have had stability issues, but we use Barracuda NG firewall in HA mode. Therefore, we did not have problems with availability of services. HA mode operates very well.

We have had no issues due to scalability.

On a scale from one to 10, my rating is an eight. Level 1 and 2 of their support are good, but if you want serious expertise (Level 3), there are some issues. This is related to my area, maybe it is different in some other areas.

I have personally used a lot of different solutions in my career (Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, etc.). 

I switched to this solution for the first time due to group standards. After trying this solution, I liked it and it became one of my favorites. 

The setup is very intuitive for people with network technology knowledge. 

It is a product with a very transparent model of licensing. In the sense of hidden expenses, they do not exist with this model. 

We evaluated a lot of different options. We concluded that Barracuda NG Firewall provided the most features for an exemplary price. 

My advice is to try and evaluate it (Barracuda offers a trial period of one month). I think that a lot of people will be pleasantly surprised with its possibilities.

The solution is deployed on premises.

The ability to be deployed and supported remotely is valuable. They also have a feature called instant hardware replacement.

Essentially, if you subscribe to a service, they replace the whole system in about four years, including the hardware. So, you have a new and upgraded one. Since there is a technology refresh, you don't have to consider replacing it or acquiring a new one.

The price could be better. The problem is that the network security landscape is very dynamic. New threats come in daily, and new approaches must be made. However, we haven't encountered anything Barracuda CloudGen Firewall couldn't handle so far.

We have been using this solution for several years.

Based on our experience, we find it very stable. We can set it up and forget about it. However, there are a few instances where we had to add capabilities and we did not have any problems.

The solution is scalable, but if you acquire it for a specific size or capability and exceed that capability, you need to acquire a new solution. You don't have to do a forklift upgrade, and you can add the capability. Essentially, they work together to provide a higher capacity and add solutions, but it's not elegant because you have multiple hardware platforms.

 The customer service and support team is very supportive.

Positive

The setup is a bit complex. However, if you have the required skill set, it is easy. Unfortunately, in our experience, we didn't have the skill set the first time we did it, so it took us a while. The Philippine distributor was also not well-versed with the solution when we had our first implementation. Now that we developed the skillset, setting up is not that difficult.

I rate the price seven out of ten.

We do not have the experience of comparing it with another NG firewall. However, we can compare it with the traditional hardware-based firewall. I think Barracuda is more flexible because of how it is designed, with the capability to add features. So it is very flexible.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I would recommend Barracuda CloudGen Firewall to almost everybody, and I couldn't foresee anyone to whom I wouldn't recommend unless they are very price sensitive.

Our primary use case for this solution is to replace vendor-managed MPLS with in-house managed SD-WAN.

This solution has allowed us to use multiple commodity internet connections at our locations, added greater control of internet usage, and enhanced security.

The most valuable features are SD-WAN, URL filtering, IPS, and virus scanning.

The technical manuals, at times, have images that don't match the actual screens and are not always as clear as they could be on the configuration. This requires a call to their very good support department.

Technical support is very good.

We are mostly using it for spam filtering. We have had great success with Barracuda Cloud, using it to block any spam before it even gets to our on-premise devices. I also had the same results occur at my previous place of employment, so I have had a lot of success with the product.

If we didn't have it, then we would be spammed constantly. It has cut down the amount of emails that get through to our end users.

• It is easy to use.
• It actually works really well. 
• Barracuda is very prompt at blocking any new spam which comes out.

To start working with spam, it takes a while because the product has to see that multiple emails are coming in with all the spam. If it could reduce that amount of time, then we would reduce the amount of users who are receiving spam.

It is very stable. We haven't had any issues with it on the cloud or even on-premise. On-premise, we have two of them that are set to high availability, and they have never gone down.

It is very scalable, especially with its cloud feature. It doesn't matter how many users I have on my end, and we are a shop of about 800 to 1000 users. So, it is working perfectly.

I have called in a few times to the tech support, and they have been on top of it. If I have a problem, they respond immediately to help. Whomever I speak with is very knowledgeable about the product. Therefore, I have not had any issues with the technical support.

The initial setup for on-premise was an easy setup. 

I wasn't part of the evaluation process.

Give Barracuda a try because it has been successful in my experience. The product is foolproof. It has done everything that we have needed with the amount of email that we receive, and it handles it quite well. So, I would give it a ten out of ten and  recommend it to anyone for use.

I have used the on-premise and Barracuda Cloud versions of the product. We are only now looking into AWS.

They are already pushing it out to the cloud and putting another layer in front of it before it even gets to me.